Rick Borstein, an Adobe marketer for the Legal Vertical market, maintains a blog wherein he writes about — Adobe applications for lawyers. A mention at pdfforlawyers.com took me over there to check out an article on why PDF creation clones sometimes don’t make it.
And Rick is correct, and his parade of horribles backed with technical explanations make the article worth reading. I’ve reviewed a number of PDF Printer Drivers over the years, and not all of them worked, correctly. One insisted on “printing” in landscape mode, and another simply created so-called PDF files that I couldn’t get Adobe Reader to read. Most of them created files that were larger than Acrobat created. Others couldn’t do a good job with digital signatures and yet another couldn’t insert a page or move pages around. But most of them (including the driver built in to the latest WordPerfect Office and the one built in to OpenOffice) worked well with the simple uses to which I put them.
But understand that almost all of the PDF files I create are from a word processor or electronic spreadsheet, using common fonts. Certainly, that’s so if I’m preparing a motion or schedule or other pleading for electronic filing. Also, I’ve had no difficulties with a typical windows graphics file or, another typical PDF application for me, in “printing” a Web page — often a receipt or other evidence of an electronic transaction — to PDF. I imagine that strange fonts and foreign languages, particularly in other than Roman alphabets could present difficulties that some of the clones cannot handle.
I do find it convenient to create a PDF from within my word processor application, and if the program that can do that is also inexpensive, well I can live with that. This is not to say that Adobe can’t sometimes do what the clones can’t, or that even a small law firm shouldn’t have a full copy of Acrobat on hand for when it’s needed. It can and even a small law firm should. But I suspect that even Rick would admit that not every computer in the office needs “the full Acrobat”.
Several years ago, in what I took to be a smart marketing effort, Adobe sold half price copies of Acrobat to members of various bar associations. (And if you had some evidence you were a lawyer, you didn’t even had to be a member of a bar association.) It wouldn’t be a bad idea if Adobe tried it again.
But one thing is clear: every lawyers needs some way of writing PDF files. It is very difficult to practice law, these days, without such capability.
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